This day sort of got away from me. Long story, nothing bad though. I’m at Citi, but I’m without a computer with which to make more posts. Jason Bay’s favorite sandwich is turkey and provolone on wheat without dressing. Tim Byrdak and Jason Isringhausen both favor classic Reubens.
Briefly: I feel like every article I read about Carlos Beltran these days starts with a lengthy introduction about how many or most Mets fans will never appreciate Carlos Beltran, then goes on to explain that Beltran is actually awesome.
If you’re reading this site, you’re familiar with those general themes.
But I wonder if at this point most Mets fans actually do appreciate Beltran’s contributions to the Mets. It sure seems like I read a lot more articles praising Beltran than blaming Beltran, though I’ll amount that the blogosphere is probably not the best barometer of the larger Mets fanbase.
I know there are at least a few stubborn Beltran-blamers out there, some so steadfast in their moronic dedication to confirmation bias that it borders on performance art, but it feels like the Mets fans I interact with on the Internet at least have mostly come around to thinking that Beltran has done way more good than harm for the club in his tenure in Flushing.
A lot of it is certainly nostalgia, and the knowledge that Beltran’s certainly a goner at some point in the near future. A lot of it has to do with his hot start.
But whatever it is, good. People need to recognize.
I had a crappy day yesterday. It was certainly nothing tragic and nothing, in truth, that will even negatively impact today. I just suffered a steady stream of minor annoyances, starting with getting caught in a cloudburst at 9:15 a.m., ending with missing my train at 9:54 p.m. — first-world problems all, but in such a relentless onslaught that if the events of my day were condensed into the opening montage of a movie, you’d probably say, “this movie sucks, no one has days like that.” It was like a coin coming up tails 12 times in a row or something.
As a byproduct of some of that I missed a good portion of the Mets game, including what I understand were some pretty frustrating bunts. I tuned back in right after one of them, so I did see — in thrilling high definition — the part where Justin Turner ripped a ball that somehow redirected off Hanley Ramirez to Omar Infante to perfectly set up a double play. I also caught the part where Ryota Igarashi went to a full count on to Marlins reliever Burke Badenhop then yielded a go-ahead base hit to Marlins reliever Burke Badenhop.
And then, of course, I watched pinch-hitter Jon Niese smack a triple over Emilio Bonifacio’s head in center field, only to have Jose Reyes strike out to end the game with the mighty Chin-Lung Hu looming on deck.
Apparently Hu came in to pinch-hit — which should never happen — in part of the game I missed earlier. He was sent to Triple-A while I was asleep later. Hu grounded into a fielder’s choice in his lone at-bat, sparing himself the indignity of going to Buffalo with strikeouts in more than half of his plate appearances.
But he’s gone now, as is Igarashi, the Mets’ Far East contingent banished to Western New York. They are replaced on the roster by Ruben Tejada and Pedro Beato, with Nick Evans likely to join the team whenever David Wright goes kicking and screaming to the disabled list.
So really the only thing we’re left with to complain about in last night’s game is the bunting, and that’s nothing new. That’s bunting. Managers love bunting.
You have enough days, you’re bound to have some bad ones. Sometimes Burke Badenhop’ll beat you. You can’t win ’em all, like they say.
According to Sandy Alderson, doctors at the Hospital for Special Surgery diagnosed David Wright with a stress fracture in his lower back today. Wright is out of the lineup tonight while the Mets seek a second opinion, and Alderson stressed that the injury — if the diagnosis is accurate — would require no more than a couple of weeks of rest.
So that sucks.
But then the bright side, I suppose, is that the Mets have been hitting without getting much from Wright and that — if Alderson is correct that the injury is not one that will linger — they will benefit from the addition of a healthy Wright to the lineup in a few weeks. Obviously it doesn’t help that they’re already without Ike Davis, though.
You really don’t want Willie Harris playing third base — or anywhere — on an everyday basis. So someone has gotta figure something out. Is this how the suddenly Nick Evans winds up back in Flushing, out of options though he may be?
David Wright is not playing today, which seems like pretty bad news. Wright sat out Thursday’s game against the Rockies to rest his aching upper back, and if David Wright is missing two games within the course of a week that means something’s up. Apparently Sandy Alderson is addressing the press momentarily, so I’m sure we’ll find out what’s up via Twitter barrage soon.
Bob Ojeda is chatting live during the third inning of tonight’s game, which is better news. The chat is already open so you can start asking him stuff now.
I am, as if often the case, the moderator of said live chat — the one that will inevitably be accused of carrying out some grand Wilpon conspiracy when I don’t put through the question about why the Mets aren’t signing Manny. This means I’ll be at the studio pretty late tonight, which means I’m cutting out of the office pretty early today. You don’t care about any of that except in that in relates to you, of course, which is to say it’ll be pretty quiet here the rest of the day.
It’s as if the great advances of human civilization, in everything from animal husbandry to mathematics to architecture to manufacturing to information technology, have all crescendoed with the Crunchwrap Supreme, delivered via the pick-up window.
– Karl Taro Greenfield, Bloomberg BusinessWeek.
Man, I’ve been saying this since the Crunchwrap Supreme came out. Via @Chakrabs.
Another week, another delayed sandwich. My bad. Resting my back again. It’s on the mend I think.
This one came via recommendation from noted Twitterer @Bobby_BigWheel, who in fact joined me for the sandwich. That turned out to be important, since I would not have been able to figure out the system on my own. More on that in a bit.
For like the billionth straight week, the sandwich of the week includes pork. Actually, this sandwich includes almost exclusively pork. My bad. I hereby promise that next week’s sandwich will not include pork. Even if that means me eating something humble that I construct myself, like just a ham and cheese or something, I’ll do it. Wait, ham, no!
The sandwich: Porchetta on Italian bread from Di Palo Dairy, 200 Grand St. in Manhattan.
The construction: Porchetta on Italian bread.
Only it’s a little more complex than that…
Important background information: The system at Di Palo is not an intuitive one. This is why it’s good to go with someone experienced like Mr. BigWheel. Since it is a meat-and-cheese shop and not necessarily foremost a sandwich purveyor, you first take a number at the counter, then go pick out bread. When it’s your turn, you hand them the bread you’ve chosen — a loaf of Italian bread is an obvious choice for a hero — then tell them what you want on it, and how much.
A half-pound is a good guideline for a hefty hero-sized sandwich. I don’t know if anyone adds cheese or any other sort of meat to porchetta sandwiches. They were recommended to me with only porchetta, and I was so busy trying to figure out the system (and running a bit late, to boot) that I wasn’t about to stray from the standard.
Porchetta, I should say, is an Italian roast pork. From the Internet, it seems like it is the type of thing that varies pretty widely in terms of preparation and seasoning.
What it looks like:
How it tastes: Amazing. That is to say this is a sandwich that prompts amazement.
Specifically, I am amazed: a) That a food which is technically only one thing — porchetta — can be responsible for such an outrageous array of flavors and textures and b) That I had somehow gone 30 years and nearly four months without eating that thing.
Holy crap, that’s a good thing.
I’m guessing Di Palo’s porchetta — maybe all porchetta? — comes from the belly of the pig (the part we use for bacon), because there’s crispy, salty skin in there, enough to give the whole sandwich some crunch. And then there’s the fat — I know that sounds gross, but consider that there’s no dressing on this sandwich and a lot of what we use to dress sandwiches isn’t much different than pure fat anyway — which seeps into the bread and makes the whole thing practically drip with moisture. And the hunks of pork-flavored pork. Oh lord WE HAVE TO GO BACK.
And the seasonings! I don’t even know what was in there. Rosemary? Is that rosemary? I think that’s rosemary. It’s delicious. There’s a peppery kick, too — a spicyness that gets you toward the end of the sandwich, that you don’t even notice at the beginning because you’re too busy thinking about how awesome pork is.
How awesome is pork?
Sorry. Look, lest you think this is some sort of weird cultural or religious schaudenfreude and I’m trying to brag that my particular backgrounds allow me to enjoy the meat of this particular beast, trust that I just happen to really, really enjoy the meat of this particular beast. It’s so amazing. I mean, chicken is great and all, but I defy you to find me a chicken that — no matter how it’s prepared — can produce half as many flavors and textures as you’ll find on a sandwich like this one. You can’t. There’s no chicken.
I didn’t even get to the bread on this sandwich. That was great too. Enshrine it!
What it’s worth: You pay for the meat by the pound and the bread is separate, even though they construct it for you. All told, the sandwich was something like $7.16.
How it rates: 93 out of 100.
Over at Amazin’ Avenue, James Kannengieser points out at the N.Y. Post has presented as news the fact that the Mets owe Bobby Bonilla deferred salary through 2035 — something that has been public knowledge for years.
Here’s my conspiracy theory, based on nothing but anecdotal evidence: In these tough times for the newspaper industry, stories about the Mets owing Bobby Bonilla a ton of money are practically guaranteed to go viral, racking up pageviews as the few remaining souls that somehow didn’t know how the Mets owe Bobby Bonilla a ton of money giggle and forward them around to their friends and family with an “OMG LOL.”
I figure this because nearly every time this great revelation “breaks,” one of my friends or family members forwards me the article with an “OMG LOL.”
So probably some enterprising Post editor guessed that enough time had passed since the last paper got the big scoop on how the Mets still owe Bobby Bonilla a ton of money until long after the end of the Mayan calendar or peak oil or the Singularity or whatever doomsday scenario you espouse, and knew that with precious little effort his paper could reap the thousands of pageviews guaranteed by a tragically unoriginal news item on a bit of whimsy pertaining to the Mets’ financial woes.
For no reason at all. It went way longer than I expected, so, I don’t know, print it out and read it on your commute home or something.
What follows may seem a bit ridiculous, but it’s all true. Names have been changed to protect the innocent and guilty.
In suburbia, or at least my neck of suburbia, high-school kids prank other high-school kids by covering their homes and the surrounding trees and bushes in toilet paper. It’s reasonably harmless — nothing more than a pain in the ass if you’re on the long end of the high jinks, a morning spent pulling toilet paper out of your hedges (for some reason some people try to blast it out with garden hoses, but that’s actually a terrible idea. Wet toilet paper is way more difficult to get down than dry stuff).
And it’s one hell of a rush to do the toilet-papering: A huge group of kids working in unison in absolute silence, watching as a property becomes blanketed in white tissue, your collective efforts quickly and stealthily reaping tangible, visible rewards.
At our school, the boys’ soccer team toilet-papered the girls’ soccer team and vice versa. Same for basketball. Same for lacrosse. That left the football team at a loss for a traditional toilet-papering rival, and though occasionally we tried to forge something with the girls’ volleyball squad, it rarely held. So we developed a reasonably nasty habit of toilet-papering the crap (pardon) out of anyone who quit the team midseason, or who otherwise pissed us off whatever reason.
This is how we came to John Wallenheimer’s house one Friday evening in the beginning of my senior year.
Wallenheimer, I should say, suffered through a situation not dissimilar to the one Gregg Jefferies faced in Queens some 10 years earlier. His family had moved to town the previous winter from New Hampshire, and with them came talk of his older brothers’ athletic exploits: One had been an All-State football player, the other a near NBA-caliber hoops star.
Our football team sucked, but our coach — a great man who really did deserve better — was nothing if not a perpetual optimist. Hearing word of the older Wallenheimers, he pegged so many of his always-lofty hopes for the next season on young John.
Only then in August when practice started, John Wallenheimer was nowhere to be seen. And when he finally showed up a week late with no explanation anyone found satisfying, he wasn’t particularly good. Not terrible, either, just nothing close to the player we — and our coaches — dreamed he might be.
Perhaps because he was a new kid or perhaps — who knows — due to the pressure that comes with unreasonable expectations, he never really fit in with the rest of the team. He quit the week before the season started. Rumor had it he said some nasty things about some of the other guys on the squad, too.
So long story short we set out to toilet-paper the kid’s house. I’m not saying it was a decent thing to do to a new kid in town who obviously had some early trouble making friends and I’m not saying it’s something I’m proud of looking back on it, but it was something we were doing nonetheless. It was high school, leave me alone.
We went to Pathmark, bought as much toilet paper as we could afford, cracked a joke to the cashier about having stomach problems, and assembled as a team in the parking lot.
By then we knew the protocol: We took all the toilet paper out of its packaging and evenly distributed it into the trunks of seven cars. Next, we evenly distributed football players into those same seven cars, mapped out the route to the Wallenheimers’ house and established a rendezvous point at a local elementary school in case anything went wrong.
The procession drove to the area and turned onto the Wallenheimers’ street — headlights off, music down. We parked a half-block away, emptied out of our cars, popped the trunks, and gathered arm-loads of toilet paper. Sticking to lawns so as not to create the type of racket associated with a full football team stampeding on pavement, we jogged down the block to the house.
The house had but a few trees and wasn’t great for toilet-papering, but that never stopped us before. I threw the first roll.
It’s a gorgeous sight when it’s heaved the right way, the tail of paper cascading behind the spinning roll, the roll hooking over a tree branch and dropping to the ground with a small thud. And it’s one of those things where once one goes, a bunch soon follow, like car horns honking in traffic or, I presume, muskets firing at Revolutionary War battles. So soon enough there were 30-some rolls of toilet paper flying, hooking, streaming, covering various parts of the Wallenheimer’s property.
It was short-lived.
I don’t know if we made too much noise with our first round of throws or if the Wallenheimers were a particularly vigilant family, but before I could throw a second roll I spotted a break in the Venetian blinds in the front window and a pair of eyeballs peeking out.
Now, generally in a mild-mannered suburb like ours if someone caught you toilet-papering their house they just kind of came to the door and shooed you away, and you ran because the clandestine aspect of it was part of the fun, and because it didn’t seem right to just go on throwing toilet paper on someone’s hedges while he was standing right there watching you do it.
So spotting the Wallenheimer at the window, I called for everyone to get out of there and we scrambled toward cars.
In this case, my instincts were spot-on.
I don’t know if they don’t have toilet-papering in New Hampshire or if the Wallenheimers just took particular offense to the prank. But they were not content to just stand on the front stoop shaking fists. Oh no.
Out of the door came a stream of Wallenheimers that, I promise you, lived up to everything our coach had told us about their athletic prowess. They were huge and they were fast and they were absolutely terrifying. I don’t know how many there were — I was running away — but it was definitely way more than one football dude and one basketball guy. The Wallenheimers were legion. And they must have had some sort of dedicated sporting goods closet right inside their front door, because they were all brandishing various items of athletic equipment to be used as weapons: baseball bats, hockey sticks, tennis rackets.
And here’s the exceptionally weird part: They were naked.
Not like bear-ass full-frontal or anything. Just various stages of undress, ranging from, say, tank-top and boxers to shirtless and boxer-briefs.
In the moment, we were all too terrified to try to sort out what the hell could be going down in the Wallenheimer household on at 9:30 on a Friday night that would have a bunch of young musclebound dudes indecent and ready to savage an entire high-school football team. We sprinted to our cars and sped away, leaving in our wake countless fuming New Hampshiremen.
At the elementary school, it took a few minutes for us to stop giggling before we realized we were down to only six cars. Phil, our starting tight-end and co-captain, was nowhere to be seen. We gave him a few minutes, hoping by some chance he went to the wrong school or stopped at 7-11 or something, then we faced cold reality.
They got him. The Wallenheimers got Phil and the four of our teammates he had in his car, and now someone had to go back and make sure they were OK. For all we knew this could be a Deliverance scenario.
I was the other captain; it was pretty clearly my responsibility. Riding shotgun in my ’94 Nissan Sentra I had my friend Cory, an outside linebacker and one of the stronger and more reliable dudes on the team. He was right for the mission, and up for it too. In the back sat a couple of pothead benchwarmers, awesome guys no doubt, but guys I’m pretty sure only came along that night to collect empty toilet-paper rolls with which to build bongs. But they were too lazy to get out of the car, and too indifferent to danger. So we set off.
When we turned onto the Wallenheimers’ street for the second time that night — lights on this time — we could see Phil’s Grand Cherokee down the block, parked in front of the house with the hazards on.
As I crept toward Phil’s jeep, I noticed that it seemed like the commotion outside the Wallenheimers’ had settled. No one was being brutalized, at least.
But the biggest Wallenheimer of them all stood in the middle of the road. The end-boss Wallenheimer. Bald on top with gray hair creeping around the side, he wore only tighty whiteys. He held a cigarette in one hand and a golf club in the other. His broad shoulders supported the massive gut he wore with no shame at all.
“Oh s@#$,” Cory said. “That must be the dad.”
He spotted the car and started walking slowly in our direction. He lifted his cigarette to his mouth and left it there.
Then he started running. All out sprint. And it must have been 30 yards from where he stood to the car but he closed it quick, lifting the golf club above his head as he did. From the backseat, the pothead guys unleashed a classic stoner-guy, Bill-and-Ted-in-the-phone-booth yell.
In perhaps my all-time greatest driving maneuver, I threw the car in reverse and executed a razor-sharp two-point turn, threading the needle between two parked cars — not the type of thing they teach you in driver’s ed and in truth something that necessitates the type of turning radius you really only find on a fine automobile like the 1994 Nissan Sentra. And I did this at high speed, despite the pressure of a giant naked man chasing me with a golf club and with the added distraction of a couple of terrified stoners screaming their lungs out in the backseat.
Of this I am proud. I am not proud of ditching Phil.
We found out at practice the next day that one of the Wallenheimers had reached into his car, grabbed his keys and thrown them into the bushes, and that Phil and the guys in his car had been forced at bat-point to clean up all the toilet paper on the property by a very humorless and scantily clad family.
That was the last time we went toilet-papering that year, incidentally.
This has been making its way around the Internet, but it came to me via Alex. Turns out, the Mets started wearing black uniforms due in part to their marketing department and in part to ousted and disgraced clubhouse manager Charlie Samuels, who seems to be quickly replacing Tony Bernazard as the bugaboo responsible for everything that went wrong in Flushing for the past 20 years.
The interview with black-uniform designer Bob Halfacre an entertaining read from Paul Lukas, and it’s been fun to follow the Samuels stuff if only because it provides a bit of insight into some of the things even credentialed reporters don’t see inside Major League Baseball operations. The problem is, since we don’t see similar reports on other organizations, we have few points of comparison for any of this.
B ut certainly, since Samuels was such a long-tenured Mets employee who undoubtedly had more responsibility than most clubhouse managers, he had more say in matters like uniform choices and, apparently, shady back-of-the-truck memorabilia sales than most in his position.
As for the black uniforms: I’m not a huge fan, but I’m such a contrarian by nature and there’s such fervent distaste for them among fellow Mets fans that it’s difficult for me to muster up the strength to rally against them. I guess I just care a lot more about the quality of the team on the field than the color of the jersey it is wearing.
Plus — and this is going to really bother some people — I’d honestly be all for the Mets slightly altering their primary colors. I like wearing baseball hats, but — and, I know, heresy! — the Mets’ royal blue is a little loud for my tastes. My fitteds of choice in recent years have been a Colt .45s throwback and a Detroit Tigers home hat, Magnum PI style.
Perhaps I’ll be tarred and feathered in Willets Point for writing this, but if the Mets muted their colors a bit, I’d be a lot more likely to support them at times when I’m not specifically going to a Mets game. Sorry.
Straight-up trolling.
UPDATE: I realize I didn’t suggest an alternative to the existing colors: Something like the Colt .45s’ navy and orange might be nice. Or maybe just like a slate blue, something grayer than the current bright royal, with a darker orange. Maybe something unlike anything that’s currently on a Major League uniform. Outside the box here.
Tedquarters 